In a world taken over by a pandemic, time seems to have come to a standstill. However, the household has emerged as a site of work, production and reproduction, with an increasing burden of unpaid work taking hours out of women’s lives. In this context, data regarding time use is a crucial component of our understanding of women’s work and lives, and thereby of the requisite interventions. The recently released India Time Use Survey 2019 (the first national TUS for the country) is therefore, a worthy addition to the data and information on women’s work in India.
The term ‘women’s work’ often refers only to remunerative, and hence ‘productive’ work. In other theorisations, it is seen as comprising paid and unpaid work, the latter being those tasks which are not compensated for, and may be displaced onto others. These activities are crucial for the reproduction of labour power but are considered to be unproductive and are not remunerated, thereby subsidising the economy (Ghosh, 2012). Taking these into account, a holistic conceptualisation of women’s work is that of the continuum which consists of paid work, underpaid work and unpaid work (Antonopoulos, 2008). This concept owes itself to the complex interactions between the various types of work that women engage in, which cannot completely be captured by viewing it as a dichotomy or as a monolithic entity.
Time Use Surveys or statistics are essentially summaries that provide in-depth information regarding how individuals ‘utilise’ their time, collected over a period varying from a 24-hour day to all 7 days of the week. The information gleaned from these surveys helps us understand what activities individuals undertake, their intensity and how much time it takes for them to pursue each activity (United Nations, 2005). Time Use Surveys have proven useful for academic/research practice, and in informing public policy. The development discourse in both the Global North and South, had propagated the sex-role theory; for example, the notion that the traditional roles of males are as the earning members of the household while females are meant to be in charge of domestic work. Over time this has been challenged, paving way for more inclusive research and data collection on women’s work (Kabeer, 1994). To this end, Hirway (2009) had shown how India’s pilot TUS (1998-99) can be used for estimating and providing visibility to all forms of work; informal, subsistence (which is included in SNA activities but is difficult to capture) and non-SNA work.
The TUS 2019 brings out glaring differences in the amount of time spent by men and women in these activities. In India, the time spent by women in unpaid domestic services is more than 3 times that by men (see Table 1). Around 57 % of men and around 18% of women are engaged in employment and related activities, however when we look at unpaid domestic services, around 26% of men and 81% of women engage in such work. Time use surveys are an important source of information regarding time poverty, a concern in developing economies especially, with various intersections between time-poor and income-poor sections of the population (Zacharias, 2017). As we can observe from the TUS estimates, women spend less time in other activities, ostensibly due to their disproportionate burden of unpaid work.
Table 1: National Level Estimates of Time-Use in India
Source: Time Use in India-2019 Report
Moreover, considering women’s work in totality, the lines between paid and unpaid work are often blurred. India’s TUS does collect data on simultaneous activities, the burden of which has been observed to fall more on the poor and women. This feature may help us in improving estimates of paid and unpaid work, as it is able to account for activities undertaken simultaneously, which are often not captured by labour force surveys. It can also help us understand the burden of work and time stress when multiple strenuous activities are conducted, thereby proving useful in devising interventions to reduce time stress, especially on women. However, this data has proven difficult to collect due to inability of respondents to recognise and/or report these activities on their own, requiring probing and follow-ups. Simultaneous activities are a relatively unexplored area of surveys across countries, especially developing countries; the data is simply not collected/utilised in many cases. Even the Indian TUS, which does collect this data, simply divides it into two parts without classifying it as primary or secondary. Robust data collection and analysis is imperative in this regard.
Paid and unpaid work do not exist in neat silos that have no linkages with each other; even paid work is riddled with oppressive and exploitative conditions, including but not restricted to sex segregation of occupation and gender wage gaps. Further, from a political economy perspective, as Mies (1968) has argued, the usual conception of a working day (“8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will”) does not necessarily hold when we consider women’s work. As the world reels under the shock of the pandemic, the household has transformed as a site of not just safety, but of work and livelihood. While following the norms of social distancing and self-isolation, we begin to see how the burden of tackling the pandemic, ideally to be borne by the state and the healthcare infrastructure, has instead now been displaced onto household. As rightly pointed out by Deshpande (2020), this is another instance of the damning consequences of gender-blind policies. Under the onslaught of the neoliberal regime, the changing production structures and restructuring of labour for flexibility had altered the nature of the household as well, this had not been adequately addressed by public policy and the effect of trade liberalisation and associated changes on non-SNA work had not been fully comprehended (Hirway, 2017). Now, in the existing patriarchal set up of households which have largely kept the sexual division of labour intact, care work, along with an increased burden of domestic household chores, have begun to increasingly exert their pressure on women, a situation which had been further exacerbated by a nationwide lockdown. As the world begins to ‘work from home’, we see power relations operating, both within and outside the household, forcing women to spend hours doing backbreaking work, often not even recognised as work in discourses and surveys. There is a desperate need to evolve our statistical architecture and public policy to understand these changes.
While the national level TUS in India is a welcome start, the fact that it was conducted twenty years after the pilot TUS is a cause for concern. Many Latin American countries have shown promising results in their efforts to institutionalise time use surveys through ‘learning by doing’ over several years, leading to consistent national level time use surveys, in spite of several structural barriers (Esquivel, 2017). Moreover, efforts should not be limited to merely improving collection of data; time use statistics and analysis must be taken seriously by policymakers as well. In the same vein, as Hirway (2020) has argued, India would do well to conduct a TUS in tandem with its labour force surveys to address issues of sampling and comparability. The ambit of the survey must be expanded to incorporate more qualitative as well as quantitative data. Despite the importance of time use surveys being highlighted repeatedly, attention to such surveys, their institutionalisation, and larger issues of women’s work, rights and lives has been scant if not non-existent. Time use surveys are the first step, we must take these measures to their natural conclusion by formulating appropriate policies and begin by at least recognising women as equal stakeholders in the system with their rights, agency and entitlements.
References
Antonopoulos, R. (2008). The Unpaid Care Work–Paid Work Connection. The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection, Working Paper No.541. The Levy Economics Institute.
Deshpande, A. (2020, April 1). How India’s lockdown has put women at a greater disadvantage. Scroll.in. (Retrieved from https://scroll.in/article/957787/how-indias-lockdown-has-put-women-in-middle-class-homes-at-a-greater-disadvantage)
Esquivel, V. (2017). Time-Use Surveys in Latin America: 2005-15. In I. Hirway (ed.). Mainstreaming Unpaid Work: Time-Use Data in Developing Policies (03-109). Oxford University Press
Ghosh, J. (2012). Women, Labour and Capital Accumulation in India. Monthly Review Press, January 2012. Retrieved from: https://monthlyreview.org/2012/01/01/women-labor-and-capital-accumulation-in-asia/
Hirway, I. (2009). Mainstreaming Time-Use Surveys in National Statistical System in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 44 (49), 56-65.
-(2017). Trade Liberalisation and Unpaid Work. In I. Hirway (ed.). Mainstreaming Unpaid Work: Time-Use Data in Developing Policies (369-406). Oxford University Press
-(2020, November 21). The ‘Time Use Survey’ as an opportunity lost. The Hindu.
Kabeer, N. (1994). Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. Verso
Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Zed Books.
National Statistical Office (2019). Time-Use in India-2019. Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India.
United Nations. (2005). Guide to Producing Time Use Statistics: Measuring Paid and Unpaid Work. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/SeriesF/SeriesF_93E.pdf
Zacharias, A. (2017). The Measurement of Time and Income Poverty. In I. Hirway (ed.). Mainstreaming Unpaid Work: Time-Use Data in Developing Policies (03-109). Oxford University Press
Aishwarya Rajeev is a PhD Scholar in Economics at the School of Liberal Studies, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, India. She can be contacted via email at aishwaryarajeev7@gmail.com or on Twitter.
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